If you need a reminder, check out the Part one description from last semester.

 

This project was designed as a year long project with time as one of our tools.  Another tool that The New School frequently utilizes is looking at the same big idea in multiple forms, and during multiple times of a week.

It became obvious, as children added more and more pictures and questions to the Animal Alphabet books that they deserved to have answers to some of their questions.  We often remind our Student Teachers not to think of their classes as frozen in one period from 11:00-11:50.  The threads can be extended to other periods, places and times.  We have the flexibility to approach a project/idea from many viewpoints. With this project, we did just that.  By mid-Winter we extended our project to journaling time. We paired a student with a teacher or workstudy student to research the answer to at least 5-6 of their questions. Using a tablet, students, alternating with their adult, would either type their question or write the answer. It was fascinating to turn the tables “with” them and find answers to almost every single one of their questions.

We, also, continued the thread of “classification” during our game times.  Using a deck of cards made by Larry Schaeffer, SU Science Education Professor, we began to play a game we called Thief/Detective.  The deck consisted of many wonderful monsters some with: 6,4 or 2 legs, 6,4 or 2 arms, 3 kinds of noses, hair or no hair, body or no body, etc. They had many attributes we could use to classify the monsters.  We also had a simple two circle Venn Diagram.  One child was the “thieves” and the rest were the “detectives”.  As the game progressed the detectives had to guess which monsters were the thieves, classifying by attributes.  As they picked one monster, the “thief” would let them know where in the Venn Diagram their “pick” would fit:  “It’s like mine in one way”, It’s like mine in another way”, It’s like mine in two ways”  YEAH!!! Or “It’s not like mine in anyway.” (This was also a very good choice-giving lots of information to the detectives.)  Kids had a good time being the thief and they became more skilled, using the clues they had been given and moving away from random guessing.

By March we had a wonderful offer from one of our volunteers who was a retired science teacher. Now volunteering at the Zoo, she took our class to see the animals, concentrating on different classes of animals. The Zoo has a mnemonic they call the “Bs”- classifying by body type, breathing, blood and babies.  Our trip to the zoo was very wonderful…reinforcing many of the attributes of animals in their own books and adding to their animal lore.  It was very helpful to see what they remembered from class and what was still barely on their periphery.

After our trip we began to use the Burnet Park Zoo chart of the “Bs”.  We were looking at the chart and using many colored highlighters as a “hook” to keep them really looking at it. We identified words related to each category and words that we could already read.  Kids thought it was fun to highlight the words that classified many of the animals they had picked…i.e. wet vs. dry, egg vs. live, warm vs. cold, etc.

Unfortunately, when we closed, our project has taken a loooong pause.  BUT..we hope to return to it when school opens in the Fall.